Lance Armstrong will lose one of the last prizes he still owns — his Olympic medal — if, as expected, he admits to having used performance-enhancing drugs in an interview with Oprah Winfrey that will air Thursday night.

“If Armstrong admits he cheated then we will be asking for the medal back, just as we would with any athlete,” Mark Adams, director of communications, told USA Today.

Armstrong, who won the bronze in the 2000 Sydney Olympics, has been stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and banned for cycling for life.

Exactly what Armstrong will reveal in the Winfrey interview and in the days to come is not precisely known, but if he were to implicate that the International Cycling Union in covering up the widespread doping scheme he is accused of leading, the sport could be removed from the Olympics, according to a Reuters report.

“The only way it [cycling] is going to clean up is if all these people say ‘Hey, we’re no longer in the Olympics and that’s where we want to be so let’s earn our way back into it,'” Dick Pound, former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency and an IOC member, said Tuesday. “The IOC would have to deal with it. The [cycling union] is not known for its strong actions to anti-doping.”

After spending most of her career in traditional print sports journalism, Cindy began blogging and tweeting, first as NFL/Redskins editor, and, since August 2010, at The Early Lead. She also is the social media editor for Sports.

Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.

To pause and restart automatic updates, click "Live" or "Paused". If paused, you'll be notified of the number of additional comments that have come in.

Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.

Spam

Offensive

Disagree

Off-Topic

Among the criteria for featured comments: likes by users, replies by users, previous history of valuable commenting, and selection by moderators.